webinfinity vs impartner · impartner: while impartner has significant core prm functionality built...

Webinfinity vs ImpartnerA Comparison

Webinfinity vs Impartner: A Comparison | 2

Impartner (formerly Treehouse) is arguably the most established Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution, with a core solution developed well over a decade ago.

It has been augmented over time with a number of additional modules, through development and acquisition, and now provides a complete set of PRM tools designed to provide an end to end solution for companies selling through a channel.

While this can be present a very appealing option to companies looking for a single suite solution, it also presents a challenge in that Impartner customers become dependent on the vendor to supply every feature, function and specialist tool needed, with modules not deep enough in functionality to compare with specialist vendors in each category. This is a common problem with all legacy PRM platforms where the solutions can feel a “mile wide and an inch deep”.

As Impartner was originally created to make up for the inability of CRM platforms to manage partner data, its core PRM capabilities now tend to compete directly with the role primary CRM system (often Salesforce, also a credible PRM vendor today). This means there can be confusion on where to manage data, workflows and other business processes due to the functional overlap between the two systems. Webinfinity alleviates this issue, working in tandem with CRM as the controlling system of record, while providing unrivalled capabilities in relation to managing user engagement at scale.

Partner Portal Management Criteria and Comparison

V


Benefit

Next-Gen, Mobile-First User Experience Component Based Interface Across the Entire Application

Core PRM Tools for Partner Management (Content Delivery, Deal Registration, Lead Distribution, Opportunity Management)

Complex Specialist PRM Modules for (Through Partner Marketing, Business Planning, Incentives Management, Payments etc.)

Enables Infinite Unique User Experiences (Partner and Internal) Without Development

Complete In-App Automated Experience Management

Flexible ‘Best of Breed’ App Integration

Enterprise Scale/Multi Vendor Architecture Future Proofing

Outcome (Consumption Based) Pricing Everything included in license - No Costs for Extra Modules

Measuring Engagement Intelligence (ROI)

Webinfinity Comparison


Next-Gen, Mobile-First User Experience Component Based Interface Across the Entire Application

Why It Is Important:

• Communicates to partners that the vendor is innovative.

• Enables partners to find what they need more quickly, on any device.

• Easiest way to deliver critical personalized experiences for different partner types, job functions, tasks, and geographies.

Webinfinity:

Webinfinity is known for its next-gen component based interface that works for a mobile device, tablet or laptop. The dynamic interface is generated by the Webinfinity engine out of the box, requiring no custom development and is consistent across all elements of the user experience.

Any customization for different partner experiences and personalization is handled via configuration that can be done by non-technical users who are part of the channel team and, most importantly, know best what drives partner engagement for their company.

Impartner:

Impartner provides different user experiences depending on the module or feature, there is no common design across all systems. Some elements of the interface follow best design/UX practices but other aspects are more legacy in nature.

The main difference between in the UX vs. Webinfinity is that Impartner partner portal follows a more web page orientated layout with traditional navigation and page elements, whereas Webinfinity is entirely component based meaning all experiences are highly differentiated based on the user (similar to Google).


Core PRM Tools for Partner Management (Content Delivery, Deal Registration, Lead Distribution, Opportunity Management)


• According to Aberdeen Group, “businesses using PRM experience 48% greater annual revenue growth”. These tools streamline key functionality partners need to successfully sell and market vendors’ products and solutions.

• Performing the key functions of channel engagement effectively is absolutely critical in driving partner engagement and revenue (yet often done poorly in most vendor portals).

Webinfinity:

Webinfinity’s approach to PRM features is to ensure the basic processes are catered for incredibly well, but through configuration, not code and custom development. This provides significant flexibility to modify features for precise needs and to easily extend to other use cases as needed.

In-app workflow is pre-configured for deal registration, lead distribution and management, onboarding, including intelligent content delivery aligned with partner opportunities (no matter where the content is stored throughout the enterprise). The configuration within the platform enables clients to easily modify fields, data objects, workflows and form login without any technical expertise.

Impartner:

While Impartner has significant core PRM functionality built into its platform, there is a significant trade off in flexibility - you have to work within the constraints of the way modules have been coded to function.

This can have significant benefits if your business processes map to the conventional structure of established channel processes such as partner onboarding, deal registration and lead distribution, but cannot be easily modified to keep up with emerging channel trends and non-standard workflows.


Complex Specialist PRM Modules (for Through Partner Marketing, Business Planning, Incentives Management, Payments etc.)


• As channel programs scale and mature, it will become increasingly important to add additional components to further automate channel management in a scalable and effective manner.

• Vendors may need to leverage existing tools, for example re-purposing learning/certification content in an existing Learning Management System (LMS) for use within the partner community.

Webinfinity:

Webinfinity embraces the rise of cloud apps, with a purpose-built architecture capable of creating a single pane of glass for any combination of tools and apps you may wish to use to support your partners.

Webinfinity agrees with the 82% of CMOs and CIOs who think a “best of breed” strategy is the only way to solve for users in the modern enterprise architecture. For this reason, Webinfinity has deliberately decided not to create “modules” designed to compete with complex specialist vendors such as Perks (Incentives/MDF), Zift (TPMA), Successful Channel (Business Planning) and many more. In fact, Webinfinity pro-actively partners with and recommends, these organizations to deliver a fully integrated solution through one unified UX.

This flexible, API-first approach to best-of-breed PRM provides ultimate choice and flexibility for clients, as well as ensuring an ability to leverage the most current technology in these speciality functions.

Impartner:

Impartner has a long list of modular add-ons that can be leveraged to address PRM challenges such as learning management, incentives, MDF management and through partner marketing. The vision of the platform is to provide clients with a single suite solution to all PRM needs.

While this in good in theory (and made complete sense before the rise of SaaS and cloud apps) it is extremely difficult to execute in practice as the platform must attempt to be a leader in multiple software categories - competing at a modular level with global specialists such as Cornerstone (LMS), Tableau (BI), Perks (Incentives) and many others.

If you want to add your own specialist or custom solutions to an Impartner driven solution this will come as a link to another vendor or involve more complex specialist integration at your costs. Unlike Webinfinity, the Impartner architecture was not built with integration to third party products in mind, meaning deviation from the standard Impartner modular features will be challenging.


Enables Infinite Unique User Experiences (Partner and Internal) Without Development


• For engagement to flourish, experiences must be entirely relevant to each and every member of the channel ecosystem.

• Partner ecosystems are complex with the variations in partner types, user job functions, geographies/languages and more. This complexity only grows as your partner program grows.

• Experience management is governed by the rules and tags used to automatically deliver personalized experiences across the partner ecosystem. Automation is a must with this ecosystem complexity.

Webinfinity:

Webinfinity’s Engagement Automation Engine enables an almost infinite number of personalized experiences, with a significant number of ways to curate assets to make it easier for partners, partner managers and program executives to get what they need.

This increases effectiveness in selling, managing partner performance and tracking program success. Personalization can be driven by partner type, user job function, user task, partner account, specific objective, and many other criteria. Personalization also can be configured at the individual asset level.

Curation can be done automatically by the system for content such as guided selling playbooks (a big time-saver for administrators, geo leads, partners and partner managers), or manually for time-driven groupings such as launches, key customer use case scenarios, etc.

With Webinfinity, new areas of personalization can be added simply through configuration, no custom development required.

Impartner:

Impartner follows a more conventional website type design approach with an ability to create a level of personalization through display rules based on partner and user profiles. All users essentially see the same portal, with the same structure, but with some different elements based on who they are.

There have been recent attempts to add more functionality in this area (for example the recently upgraded asset library module), but the overall architecture was not built to support dynamic UX generation so there will always be limitations and a lack of consistency in this capability depending on module or feature. Further personalization would likely be via a custom development project.

What happens when the structure of the partner program changes, moving away from partner tiers to different business capabilities (such as is happening with cloud partners)? This would require significant additional cost for Impartner to re-design its platform capabilities. In addition, it’s not possible to work outside the structure of the coded personalization capabilities, it’s all pre-organized and pre-coded, meaning you need to fit into the rigid structure of the templates provided.


Complete In-App Automated Experience Management


• With programs, content and communications evolving in real time it’s critical the channel team can “move at the speed of the business”.

• Without complete self-service there is too much reliance on IT or vendors resources leading to delivery delays and increased costs.

• Highly engaging portals need contributions from the entire channel community, not just portal administrators and developers.

Webinfinity:Webinfinity puts all elements of experience management in the hands of the client. Every single element of every experience (from navigation to content publishing to complex lead management) is managed in-app, via simple user interfaces that a non-technical user can control without any IT or vendor support.

Webinfinity’s no-coding solution is designed to continuously configure and curate experiences to improve engagement - whether it’s a launch for a specific set of partners, or for a specific promotion or incentive, or targeted content for a specific group of users. You can even create a specific sub portal for a new partner program for new types of partners. All the configuration can be done by the team working closest to the partners. Without the cost of custom coding, the engagement ROI is significantly increased.

Additionally, the system provides a highly flexible and scalable rules management framework enabling delegation of experience management to any member of the channel team. This ability to delegate authority to many individual contributors (for example, a technical expert in EMEA who can create just blogs that are sent only to a sub-set of partners in their region) results in much richer, ever changing engagement experiences. These experiences in turn drive increased partner engagement and productivity.

Impartner:Historically, Impartner provided very little ability to self-manage experiences with an almost total reliance on their team to update pages and create new experiences. This was a major pain point amongst Impartner clients and is still a significant pain point for many of their customers on older versions of the platform (a scenario that does not exist with a true SaaS platform like Webinfinity).

While improvements have been made to provide more self-service with regards to experience management the platform is still rooted in its legacy roots, working more at page level, using a conventional CMS (Content Management System) approach. This results in the portal being managed by a small number of people who are authorized to make changes, together with others who are able to submit content assets, but not build or curate new web experiences. This approach cannot compare with the fluidity and flexibility of the Webinfinity’s management capabilities and results in more rigid, less engaging experiences for users.


Flexible ‘Best of Breed’ App Integration

Why It Is Important:• Provides flexibility in partner management

capabilities as partner program needs evolve.

• Provides partners seamless access to additional capabilities such as campaign management, business planning, incentive payments, and more.

• Enables a unified partner “workspace” for partners to access everything they need to do business with you.

• Enables flexibility to integrate with the application innovation that is exploding in the partner management arena.

Webinfinity:Webinfinity has an extensive connected application capability embedded in its Engagement Automation Engine, partnering with many of the leading software companies of best of breed applications that are fully integrated with its engine. These include applications for incentive automation, sales opportunity management, business planning, pipeline management and more.

It has integrated with a select few of the iPaaS platform developers, each of which have portfolios of application connectors making it faster to integrate applications preferred by its clients.

It has tight integration with Salesforce and MS Dynamics CRM systems and will also work with its clients to connect other CRM systems if required.

It has created a storage connector that connects and syncs content stored in many cloud storage systems so as to enable its clients to keep content in whichever system they choose.

All integrated applications are made to work within the Webinfinity unified interface to keep the user experience as frictionless as possible. In addition to application integrations, Webinfinity can embrace and embed any desired application within its same unified interface that can be experienced in-app or in a new window.

Impartner:Impartner has a number of hard coded integrations, primarily with CRM applications and traditional enterprise applications such as Oracle, NetSuite ERP, specialized CPQ applications, and one content management platform. It has had particular success in being the premier listed PRM on the Salesforce App Exchange (and at one point was being recommended by Salesforce before they begin to compete with Impartner using Communities!).

These pre-built integrations were created to support customer needs, not as a deliberate design principle of the platform. Impartner does not believe in a best of breed architecture – relying instead on its proprietary PRM applications (individually priced modules).

While this may be appealing to the small majority of people who believe it’s possible to solve for PRM with a single vendor, this limits customers ability to trade off against the flexibility and innovation that comes from integrating or exposing best-of-breed applications as needed.


Enterprise Scale/Multi Vendor Architecture Future Proofing

Why It Is Important:• Partner engagement scalability is

critical in the early stages of a partner program where success is equated to the recruitment of additional partners. It is also essential for mature programs where new types of users and user job functions need to be served.

• Experience flexibility is important as different types of partners, user job functions and tasks require additional content assets.

• Flexibility to infinitely scale to future proof your investment as your partner program evolves is a must-have, particularly as new cloud procurement models are changing how vendors need to work with their partners.

Webinfinity:Webinfinity has proven case studies demonstrating its ability to scale to reliably serve personalized experiences to tens of thousands of users. It also has demonstrated how it can start small and enable clients to grow as their partner programs and content portfolios grow.

Webinfinity’s customer-centered feature prioritization, development and release cycles bring significant new features and functionality enhancements to its customers at least three times per year at no extra charge. This strengthens its customers’ ability to continuously improve their ability to serve their partners more effectively.

Impartner:The Impartner solution takes a more point in time approach to solving for a channel program. The implementation will be based on specific needs and functions highlighted by a client. Many smaller companies have installed Impartner only to find once needs change and evolve it is not so easy to adapt the set-up to meet the evolving needs and scale of their channel program.

For example - how could an Impartner customer pivot quickly to engage born-in-the-cloud partners with a completely different experience, and integration with the cloud provider marketplaces? The answer is not quickly or cost-effectively.

Part of the problem is reliance on legacy code which has been created by multiple vendors over time. It is difficult to modify or to extend without significant investment from Impartner and potential cost passed through to its customers. Large companies report very long implementation times with significant custom development, small companies bemoan a lack of flexibility as their needs evolve.


Outcome (Consumption Based) Pricing Everything Included in License - No Costs for Extra Modules


• Costs must be measured in terms of engagement otherwise what’s the point? Features and functions don’t mean anything without utilization.

• PRM has traditionally sold based on the number of number of administrators or modules being used – neither are key ROI metrics.

Webinfinity:

Webinfinity provides a pricing model based on Monthly Active Users (MAU’s). This means a client only pays for users who are actively engaging with the portal on a month to month basis. If there is no usage, costs will be minimal. All features are available to all clients regardless of the fees they are paying.

This enables young companies with embryonic or scaling partner programs to cost-effectively access the full features of the Webinfinity engagement automation engine. Once engagement is increased (leading directly to revenue and productivity gains) costs will follow, but with true ROI.

For larger enterprises, it provides a true economy of scale with costs based only on the sub-set of users who are active on a frequent basis.

Impartner:

Impartner costs are based more on how much you use in terms of specialist modules and features. This can make the platform very expensive once all the modular costs are added up, while providing no guarantee of utilization or user satisfaction.

Impartner is a very complex system to implement, but has recently been selling at lower prices to try and win market share (normally through heavy discounting). This creates a pressure on all concerned leading to challenges with implementations and the amount of resources Impartner can invest in making clients successful based on lower price deals. At Webinfinity our entire success is based on utilization, meaning everything we do is focused on driving adoption and engagement based ROI.


Measuring Engagement Intelligence (ROI)


• Metrics must track the level of partner and content engagement.

• Portal analytics must be able to easily share and integrate with other leadership and partner management metrics and be correlated with the solution pricing.

• Cost for customization needed to drive engagement only decreases the return on engagement.

Webinfinity:

Webinfinity captures metrics for almost every engagement within its engine and displays it through in-app analytics. This includes engagement by partner organization, user job function, content type engagement, portal engagement behaviour - i.e. search, sharing, subscribing and recommending.

Webinfinity has partnered with Snowflake to embed their data sharing technology into Webinfinity’s engagement analytics - making it easier for its clients to combine their partner management and revenue data for even more specific engagement-driven ROI calculations on-the-fly.

Impartner:

Impartner has extensive in-app analytics and reporting, although more aligned around channel performance and specific insights into the modules they provide. As with the features and functions of the platform, there are some consistency challenges with different report formats being used due to the fact they acquired vendors who used different code based to create their applications.

While it is fair to say Impartner provides strong traditional PRM reporting, it does not focus on user engagement and intelligence in the way that Webinfinity does.


Webinfinity personalizes the user experience by weaving systems and content together – at scale.

It’s born from and delivered with incredibly deep channel knowledge and experience, to drive

greater revenue, increased productivity, maximized deal flow, and enhanced partner satisfaction.

About Webinfinity

Webinfinity is focused on driving connected engagement between all participants in a business ecosystem, be it a customer, partner, vendor, supplier or employee. The company’s leadership in digital engagement has resulted in a truly unique product that can be configured for an infinite number of different use cases, users and company types and sizes.

The Webinfinity engagement automation engine intelligently and automatically connects business users to the people, information, tools, application and system resources they need to get done what they need to do - without friction, organization barriers, or system silos. Its granular personalization capabilities are second to none. Its no-code approach takes system administrators and curators to new levels of experience creation.

More information can be found at www.webinfinity.com.

https://www.webinfinity.com/

https://www.webinfinity.com/

https://plus.google.com/+Webinfinitycom

https://www.youtube.com/user/Webinfinitycom

https://www.facebook.com/Webinfinitycom/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/webinfinity-com

https://twitter.com/webinfinitycom

webinfinity vs impartner · impartner: while impartner has significant core prm functionality built...

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